Romanticism refers to a movement in art, literature, and music th during the 19 century.

In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education and natural history.

 The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror and awe especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories.

 Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to elevate a revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval, in an attempt to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar, and distant in modes more authentic than Rococo chinoiserie, harnessing the power of the imagination to envision and to escape.

 In a basic sense, the term "Romanticism" has been used to refer to certain artists, poets, writers, musicians, as well as political, philosophical and social thinkers of the late 18th and early to mid 19th centuries. It has equally been used to refer to various artistic, intellectual, and social trends of that era. Despite this general usage of the term, a precise characterization and specific definition of Romanticism have been the subject of debate in the fields of intellectual history and literary history throughout the 20th century, without any great measure of consensus emerging.

 Although the term "Romanticism" when applied to music has come to imply the period roughly from the 1820s until around 1900, the contemporary application of "romantic" to music did not coincide with this modern interpretation.

 In 1810 E.T.A. Hoffmann called Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven the three "Romantic Composers", and Ludwig Spohr used the term "good Romantic style" to apply to parts of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Technically, Mozart and Haydn are considered Classical composers, and by most standards, Beethoven represents the start of the musical Romantic period. By the early 20th century, the sense that there had been a decisive break with the musical past led to the establishment of the 19th century as "The Romantic Era", and it is referred to as such in the standard encyclopedias of music.

 The traditional modern discussion of the music of Romanticism includes elements, such as the growing use of folk music, which are also directly related to the broader current of Romantic nationalism in the arts as well as aspects already present in 18thcentury music, such as the cantabile accompanied melody to which Romantic composers beginning with Franz Schubert applied restless key modulations.

 In the contemporary music culture, the romantic musician followed a public career depending on sensitive middleclass audiences rather than on a courtly patron, as had been the case with earlier musicians and composers. Public persona characterized a new generation of virtuosi who made their way as soloists, epitomized in the concert tours of Paganini and Liszt.

 Beethoven's use of tonal architecture in such a way as to allow significant expansion of musical forms and structures was immediately recognized as bringing a new dimension to music. His later piano music and string quartets, especially, showed the way to a completely unexplored musical universe.

 The Romantic-era ballet freed itself both from opera, in which a ballet interlude retained an essential role only in Paris, and from court ftes, and independently paralleled the developments of opera with explicit narrative libretti, expressed in lengthy passages of mime, the universal presence of impetuous or ill-fated young love, the supremacy of the ballerina and the choice often of supernatural subjects: Giselle (1841) remains the supreme example.

 It is the period of 1815 to 1848 which must be regarded as the true age of Romanticism in music the age of the last compositions of Beethoven (d. 1827) and Schubert (d. 1828), of the works of Schumann (d. 1856) and Chopin (d.1849), of the early struggles of Berlioz and Richard Wagner, of the great virtuosi such as Paganini (d. 1840), and the young Liszt and Thalberg.

 In literature, Romanticism found recurrent themes in the evocation or criticism of the past, the cult of "sensibility" with its emphasis on women and children, the heroic isolation of the artist or narrator, and respect for a new, wilder, untrammeled and "pure" nature. Furthermore, several romantic authors, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, based their writings on the supernatural/occult and human psychology. Romanticism also helped in the emergence of new ideas and in the process led to the emergence of positive voices that were beneficial for the marginalized sections of the society.

 The roots of romanticism in poetry go back to the time of Alexander Pope (16881744). Early pioneers include Joseph Warton (headmaster at Winchester College) and his brother Thomas Warton, professor of Poetry at Oxford University.

 The "poet's poet" Thomas Chatterton is generally considered to be the first Romantic poet in English. The Scottish poet James Macpherson influenced the early development of Romanticism with the international success of his Ossian cycle of poems published in 1762, inspiring both Goethe and the young Walter Scott.

 An early German influence came from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther had young men throughout Europe emulating its protagonist, a young artist with a very sensitive and passionate temperament. At that time Germany was a multitude of small separate states, and Goethe's works would have a seminal influence in developing a unifying sense of nationalism.

 Another philosophic influence came from the German idealism of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schelling, making Jena (where Fichte lived, as well as Schelling, Hegel, Schiller and the brothers Schlegel) a center for early German romanticism ("Jenaer Romantik"). Important writers were Ludwig Tieck, Novalis (Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 1799), Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Hlderlin. Heidelberg later became a center of German romanticism, where writers and poets such as Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff met regularly in literary circles.

 Important motifs in German Romanticism are travelling, nature, and ancient myths. The later German Romanticism of, for example, E. T. A. Hoffmann's Der Sandmann (The Sandman), 1817, and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff's Das Marmorbild (The Marble Statue), 1819, was darker in its motifs and has gothic elements.

 Influenced heavily by Lord Byron, the foremost British Romantic poet of the time period, Lermontov sought to explore the Romantic emphasis on metaphysical discontent with society and self, while Tyutchev's poems often described scenes of nature or passions of love. Tyutchev commonly operated with such categories as night and day, north and south, dream and reality, cosmos and chaos, and the still world of winter and spring teeming with life. Baratynsky's style was fairly classical in nature, dwelling on the models of the previous century.

 Polish Romanticism revived the old "Sarmatism" traditions of Polish nobility (the szlachta). Old traditions and customs were revived and portrayed in a positive light in the Polish messianic movement and in works of great Polish poets such as Adam Mickiewicz (Pan Tadeusz), Juliusz Sowacki and Zygmunt Krasiski, as well as the writers (Henryk Sienkiewicz's Trylogia). This close connection between Polish Romanticism and Polish history became one of the defining qualities of the literature of Polish Romanticism period, differentiating it from that of other countries. They had not suffered the loss of national statehood as was the case with Poland.[29]

 In Spain, the Romantic movement developed a well-known literature with a huge variety of poets and playwrights. The most important Spanish poet during this movement was Jos de Espronceda. After him there were other poets like Gustavo Adolfo Bcquer, Mariano Jos de Larra and the dramatist Jos Zorrilla, author of Don Juan Tenorio. Before them may be mentioned the pre-romantics Jos Cadalso and Manuel Jos Quintana.

 Spanish Romanticism also influenced regional literatures. For example, in Catalonia and in Galicia there was a national boom of writers in the local languages, like the Catalan Jacint Verdaguer and the Galician Rosala de Castro, the main figures of the national revivalist movements Renaixena and Rexurdimento, respectively.

 Brazilian Romanticism is characterized and divided in three different periods. The first one is basically focused in the creation of a sense of national identity, using the ideal of the heroic Indian. Some examples include Jos de Alencar, who wrote "Iracema" and "O Guarani", and Gonalves Dias, renowned by the poem "Cano do Exlio" (Song of the Exile). The second period is marked by a profound influence of European themes and traditions, involving the melancholy, sadness and despair related to unobtainable love. Goethe and Lord Byron are commonly quoted in these works. The third cycle is marked by social poetry, especially the abolitionist movement; the greatest writer of this period is Castro Alves.

 Romanticism in British literature developed in a different form slightly later, mostly associated with the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose coauthored book Lyrical Ballads (1798) sought to reject Augustan poetry in favour of more direct speech derived from folk traditions. Both poets were also involved in utopian social thought in the wake of the French Revolution. The poet and painter William Blake is the most extreme example of the Romantic sensibility in Britain, epitomised by his claim I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's. Blake's artistic work is also strongly influenced by Medieval illuminated books. The painters J. M. W. Turner and John Constable are also generally associated with Romanticism. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats and John Clare constitute another phase of Romanticism in Britain.

 In predominantly Roman Catholic countries Romanticism was less pronounced than in Germany and Britain, and tended to develop later, after the rise of Napoleon. Franois-Ren de Chateaubriand is often called the "Father of French Romanticism". In France, the movement is associated with the 19th century, particularly in the paintings of Thodore Gricault and Eugne Delacroix, the plays, poems and novels of Victor Hugo (such as Les Misrables and NinetyThree)(also, Victor Hugo, in the preface to "Cromwell" states that " there are no rules, or models" in Romanticism), and the novels of Alexandre Dumas and Stendhal.

 Modern Portuguese poetry definitely develops its outstanding character from the work of its Romantic epitome, Almeida Garrett, a very prolific writer who helped shape the genre with the masterpiece Folhas Cadas (1853). This late arrival of a truly personal Romantic style would linger on to the beginning of the 20th century, notably through the works of poets such as Cesrio Verde and Antnio Nobre, segueing seamlessly to Modernism. However, an early Portuguese expression of Romanticism is found already in the genius of Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage, especially in his sonnets dated at the end of the 18th century.

 In the United States, romantic Gothic literature made an early appearance with Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) and Rip Van Winkle (1819), followed from 1823 onwards by the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper, with their emphasis on heroic simplicity and their fervent landscape descriptions of an already-exotic mythicized frontier peopled by "noble savages", similar to the philosophical theory of Rousseau, exemplified by Uncas, from The Last of the Mohicans. There are picturesque "local color" elements in Washington Irving's essays and especially his travel books. Edgar Allan Poe's tales of the macabre and his balladic poetry were more influential in France than at home, but the romantic American novel developed fully in Nathaniel Hawthorne's atmosphere and melodrama. Later Transcendentalist writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson still show elements of its influence and imagination, as does the romantic realism of Walt Whitman. The poetry of Emily Dickinsonnearly unread in her own timeand Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick can be taken as epitomes of American Romantic literature. By the 1880s, however, psychological and social realism was competing with romanticism in the novel.

 The European Romantic movement reached America in the early 19th century. American Romanticism was just as multifaceted and individualistic as it was in Europe. Like the Europeans, the American Romantics demonstrated a high level of moral enthusiasm, commitment to individualism and the unfolding of the self, an emphasis on intuitive perception, and the assumption that the natural world was inherently good, while human society was filled with corruption.[33]

 Romanticism became popular in American politics, philosophy and art. The movement appealed to the revolutionary spirit of America as well as to those longing to break free of the strict religious traditions of early settlement. The Romantics rejected rationalism and religious intellect. It appealed to those in opposition of Calvinism, which includes the belief that the destiny of each individual is preordained. The Romantic movement gave rise to New England Transcendentalism which portrayed a less restrictive relationship between God and Universe.

 The new religion presented the individual with a more personal relationship with God. Transcendentalism and Romanticism appealed to Americans in a similar fashion, for both privileged feeling over reason, individual freedom of expression over the restraints of tradition and custom. It often involved a rapturous response to nature. It encouraged the rejection of harsh, rigid Calvinism, and promised a new blossoming of American culture.

 American Romanticism embraced the individual and rebelled against the confinement of neoclassicism and religious tradition. The Romantic movement in America created a new literary genre that continues to influence American writers. Novels, short stories, and poems replaced the sermons and manifestos of yore. Romantic literature was personal, intense, and portrayed more emotion than ever seen in neoclassical literature. America's preoccupation with freedom became a great source of motivation for Romantic writers as many were delighted in free expression and emotion without so much fear of ridicule and controversy. They also put more effort into the psychological development of their characters, and the main characters typically displayed extremes of sensitivity and excitement.[35]

 The Romantic Era is a time in history that was surrounded by war. The Seven Years' War (17561763), the French and Indian War (17541763), and the American Revolution (17751783)which directly preceded the French Revolution (1789 1799)are all examples.

 These wars, along with the political and social turmoil that went along with them, served as the background for Romanticism. The strong feelings that wartime produces served as a catalyst for an outpouring of art and literature, the likes of which had never been seen before. The writing was so different in fact, that it sparked its own new "era": The Romantic Era

 The works of the Romantic Era are a vast and unique collection of literary works. However, they can all be said to have at least these characteristics: A love of nature, a sense of nationalism, and a sense of exoticism/the supernatural. These simple characteristics can be linked back to the fact that these works were being written in time of political turmoil. For example, the nationalism seen in Romantic works may be attributed to the fact that the authors of the time took pride in their country, their people, and their cause. It was the writers way of contributing to the fight.

 The works of the Romantic Era also differed from preceding works in that they spoke to the common people. Romantics strove towards literature and arts that were for everyone, not just wealthy aristocracy. Much of the writing predating the Romantic Era was written for, and in the style of, only the wealthy upper classes. Romantics had a hand in changing this around and it may have been because they were trying to connect with the commoners. In a time of war and political uneasiness, the writers were reaching out for a connection with their equals, not to those above them, the ones fueling the wars.

 During the Romantic period there was an increase in female authors as well. This can be attributed to the fact that this period was submerged in wartime. The women were at home, without a way to express their feelings, fight for the cause, or even connect to those around them. The writings of female Romantic writers, such as Mary Favret, are infused with feeling, and sometime even reference the war itself, e.g. Favret's War in the Air.

 In European painting, led by a new generation of the French school, the Romantic sensibility contrasted with the neoclassicism being taught in the academies. In a revived clash between color and design, the expressiveness and mood of color, as in works of J.M.W. Turner, Francisco Goya, Thodore Gricault and Eugne Delacroix, emphasized in the new prominence of the brushstroke and impasto the artist's free handling of paint, which tended to be repressed in neoclassicism under a self-effacing finish.

 As in England with J.M.W. Turner and Samuel Palmer, Russia with Orest Kiprensky, Ivan Aivazovsky and Vasily Tropinin, Germany with Caspar David Friedrich, Norway with J.C. Dahl and Hans Gude, Spain with Francisco Goya, and France with Thodore Gricault, Eugne Delacroix, Thodore Chassriau, and others; In Italy Francesco Hayez was the leading artist of Romanticism in mid-19th-century Milan; literary Romanticism had its counterpart in the American visual arts, most especially in the exaltation of an untamed American landscape found in the paintings of the Hudson River School.

 Painters like Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church and others often expressed Romantic themes in their paintings. They sometimes depicted ancient ruins of the old world, such as in Fredric Edwin Churchs piece Sunrise in Syria. These works reflected the Gothic feelings of death and decay. They also show the Romantic ideal that Nature is powerful and will eventually overcome the transient creations of men. More often, they worked to distinguish themselves from their European counterparts by depicting uniquely American scenes and landscapes. This idea of an American identity in the art world is reflected in W. C. Bryants poem, To Cole, the Painter, Departing for Europe, where Bryant encourages Cole to remember the powerful scenes that can only be found in America. This poem also shows the tight connection that existed between the literary and visual artists of the Romantic Era

 Some American paintings promote the literary idea of the noble savage (Such as Albert Bierstadts The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak) by portraying idealized Native Americans living in harmony with the natural world.

Thomas Cole's paintings feature strong narratives as in The Voyage of Life series painted in the early 1840s that depict man trying to survive amidst an awesome and immense nature, from the cradle to the grave (see below).

 To insulate theology from reductionism in science, 19th century post-Enlightenment German theologians moved in a new direction, led by Friedrich Schleiermacher and Albrecht Ritschl. They took the Romantic approach of rooting religion in the inner world of the human spirit, so that it is a person's feeling or sensibility about spiritual matters that comprises religion.

 One of Romanticism's key ideas and most enduring legacies is the assertion of nationalism, which became a central theme of Romantic art and political philosophy. From the earliest parts of the movement, with their focus on development of national languages and folklore, and the importance of local customs and traditions, to the movements which would redraw the map of Europe and lead to calls for selfdetermination of nationalities, nationalism was one of the key vehicles of Romanticism, its role, expression and meaning.

 Early Romantic nationalism was strongly inspired by Rousseau, and by the ideas of Johann Gottfried von Herder, who in 1784 argued that the geography formed the natural economy of a people, and shaped their customs and society.

 The nature of nationalism changed dramatically, however, after the French Revolution with the rise of Napoleon, and the reactions in other nations. Napoleonic nationalism and republicanism were, at first, inspirational to movements in other nations: self-determination and a consciousness of national unity were held to be two of the reasons why France was able to defeat other countries in battle.

 But as the French Republic became Napoleon's Empire, Napoleon became not the inspiration for nationalism, but the object of its struggle. In Prussia, the development of spiritual renewal as a means to engage in the struggle against Napoleon was argued by, among others, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a disciple of Kant. The word Volkstum, or nationality, was coined in German as part of this resistance to the now conquering emperor.

 This view of nationalism inspired the collection of folklore by such people as the Brothers Grimm, the revival of old epics as national, and the construction of new epics as if they were old, as in the Kalevala, compiled from Finnish tales and folklore, or Ossian, where the claimed ancient roots were invented. The view that fairy tales, unless contaminated from outside literary sources, were preserved in the same form over thousands of years, was not exclusive to Romantic Nationalists, but fit in well with their views that such tales expressed the primordial nature of a people.

 Romanticism played an essential role in the national awakening of many Central European peoples lacking their own national states, not least in Poland, which had recently lost its independence when Russia's army crushed the Polish Uprising under Nicholas I. Revival and reinterpretation of ancient myths, customs and traditions by Romantic poets and painters helped to distinguish their indigenous cultures from those of the dominant nations and crystallise the mythography of Romantic nationalism.

 Patriotism, nationalism, revolution and armed struggle for independence also became popular themes in the arts of this period. Arguably, the most distinguished Romantic poet of this part of Europe was Adam Mickiewicz, who developed an idea that Poland was the Messiah of Nations, predestined to suffer just as Jesus had suffered to save all the people.

 A list of Romantics by their contemporaries would certainly be more prestigious, and would include a majority of the leading painters working in the period 1800-50 notably: Goya (Spanish) Gricault (French) Delacroix (French) Turner (British) Blake Runge Friedrich (German)

Francisco Jos de Goya y Lucientes. March 30, 1746 April 15, 1828. Born in Fuendetodos, Spain & later lived primarily in Madrid Spanish painter & engraver. Goya used the methods of his great predecessor, Velazquez.

1819-1823 Detail of a detached fresco on canvas, full size approx. 57 x 32 Museo del Prado, Madrid

Giant1818

The Forge

16 x 23. Painted by Gericault between 1818-1819. The painting lives at the Louverne in Paris, France.

The Race of the Barbary Horses

Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible. -Baudelaire

Paganini

 Death of Sardanapalus

Philipp Otto Runge. 1777-1810 Declared that true art could be Understood only through the deepest mystical experience of religion. Runge was a religious visionary who believed in angels.

Once we see in all of nature only our own life, then it follows clearly, the right landscape can come about.

The Artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. If, however, he sees nothing w/in him, then he should also refrain from painting that w/c he sees before him. -Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich. born Sept. 5, 1774, Greifswald, Pomerania died May 7, 1840, Dresden, Saxony. was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important of the movement . Friedrich's style most influenced the painting of Johan Christian Dahl (17881857). Among later generations, Arnold Bcklin (18271901) was strongly influenced by his work, and the substantial presence of Friedrich's works in Russian collections influenced many Russian painters, in particular Arkhip Kuindzhi (c. 1842 1910) and Ivan Shishkin (183298). Friedrich's spirituality anticipated American painters such as Albert Pinkham Ryder (18471917), Ralph Blakelock (18471919), the painters of the Hudson River School and the New England Luminists.

 Like a solemn requiem. The emblems of death are everytwhere: the desolation of the season, leaning crosses & tombstones, the black of mourning worn by the grieving &by the skeletal trees, the destruction wrought by the time on the chapel. The painting is a kind of meditation of human morality, as Friedrich himself remarked: Why, it has often occurred to me to ask myself, do I so frequently choose death, transience, and the grave as subjects to my painting? One must submit oneself to death in order some day to attain life everlasting. The sharp focused rendering of details demonstraites the artists keen perception of everything in the physical environment relevant to his message.

Caspar David Friedrich, Moonrise

Caspar David Friedrich, The Solitary Tree Caspar David Friedrich, Woman at a Window

The only man that ever I knew Who did not make me almost spew Was Fuseli: he was both Turk and Jew And so, dear Christian Friends, how do you do? -William Blake's tribute to Fuseli

Swiss painter poet Critic Teacher a fervent admirer of Shakespeare, who spent most of his active career in England. Fuseli has often been regarded as a forerunner of the Romantic art movement and a precursor of Symbolism and Surrealism. His most famous painting is The Nightmare (1781), in which an ape-like goblin sits on a young woman, who is sleeping in a strained posture.

 After his romance with Lavaters niece Anna Landolt failed, he left in 1779 for London. It is though that his best-known scene, The Nightmare, refers to this affair. A young woman is mounted by a demonic looking incubus; the monster literally is a burden on her heart. She lies in a sprawl, with her arm hanging down. A horse, the night mare gazes through the curtains with phosphorescent eyes, observing or leering. It has remained a puzzle, whose nightmare Fuseli portrays-it cannot be the womans because she is part of the scene herself. It has been said, that the picture is an revenge for an unfulfilled desire, ultimately perhaps a manifestation of a jealous passion, in which the strange lover of the woman is reduced into a monster. The work became so popular that Fuseli painted several other versions on request.

Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers

The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches

Percival Delivering Belisane from the Enchantment of Urma

The Shepherd's Dream, from 'Paradise Lost'